The AI boom is screwing over Gen Z | ChatGPT is commandeering the mundane tasks that young employees have relied on to advance their careers.::ChatGPT is commandeering the tasks that young employees rely on to advance their careers. That’s going to crush Gen Z’s career path.
The fucked up part isn’t that AI work is replacing human work, it’s that we’re at a place as a society where this is a problem.
More automation and less humans working should be a good thing, not something to fear.
But that would require some mechanism for redistributing wealth and taking care if those who choose not to work, and everyone knows that’s communism.
So much this. The way headlines like this frame the situation is so ass-backwards it makes my brain hurt. In any sane world, we’d be celebrating the automation of mundane tasks as freeing up time and resources to improve our health, happiness, and quality of life instead of wringing our hands about lost livelihoods.
The correct framing is that the money and profits generated by those mundane tasks are still realized, it’s just that they are no longer going to workers, but funneled straight to the top. People need to get mad as hell not at the tech, but at those who are leveraging that tech to specifically to deny them opportunity rather than improving their life.
I need a beer. 😐
money and profits generated by those mundane tasks are still realized, it’s just that they are no longer going to workers, but funneled straight to the top
Workers should be paid royalties for their contributions. If “the top” is able to reap the rewards indefinitely, so should the folks who built the systems.
I think you misspelled “taxes,” but its possible your spelling will turn out to be more accurate.
Exactly. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with UBI.
But, the rich and plebes alike will push AI as the Boogeyman as a distraction from the real enemy.
There’s this bizarre right-wing idea that if everyone can afford basic necessities, they won’t do anything. To which I say, so what? If you want to live in shitty government housing and survive off of food assistance but not do anything all day, fine. Who cares? Plenty of other people want a higher standard of living than that and will have a job to do so. We just won’t have people starving in the street and dying of easily fixable health problems.
We also have to be careful of how people define this sort of thing, and how the wide range of our current wealth inequality affects how something like UBI would be implemented.
In the rich’s eyes, UBI is already a thing and it’s called “welfare”. It’s not enough that people on welfare can barely survive on the poverty-level pittance that the government provides, but both the rich and slightly-more-well-off have to put down these people as “mooching off the system” and “stealing from the government”, pushing for even more Draconian laws that punish their situation even further. It is a caste of people who are portrayed as even lower scum than “the poors”, right down to segregating where they live to “Section 8” housing as a form of control.
UBI is not about re-creating welfare. It’s about providing a comfortable safety net while reducing the obscene wealth gap, as technology drives unemployment even higher. Without careful vigilance, the rich and powerful will use this as another wedge issue to create another class of people to hate (their favorite pastime), and push for driving the program down just as hard as they do for welfare.
It’s not even a new thing either.
It used to be that every single piece of fabric was handmade, every book handwritten.
Humans have been losing out on labor since they realized Og was faster at bashing rocks together than anyone else.
It’s just a question of if we redistribute the workload. Like turning “full time” down to 6 days a week and eventually 5, or working hours from 12+ to 8hrs. Which inflates the amount of jobs to match availability.
Every single time the wealthy say we can’t. But eventually it happens, the longer it takes, the less likely it’s peaceful.
Where are you that 7 days a week 12 hour days is full time? That’s literally just always working. Standard full time in the states is 40 hour work weeks.
But eventually
There’s no eventually, people have been killed, murdered and harassed whilst fighting to make it a reality. Someone has to fight to make it happen and an “eventually” diminishes the value of the effort and risks put forth by labor activists all over the world throughout history. It didn’t happen magically, people worked really hard to make it so.
There are both dystopian (a tiny Elite owns the automatons and gets all gains from their work and a massive unemployed Underclass barelly surviving) and utopian (the machines do almost everything for everybody) outcomes for automation and we’re firmly in the path for Dystopia.
This was exactly the problem that Charles Murray pointed out in the bell curve. We’re rapidly increasing the complexity of the available jobs (and the successful people can output 1000-1,000,000 times more than simple labor in the world of computers). It’s the same concept as the industrial revolution, but to a greater degree.
The problem is that we’re taking away the vast majority of the simple jobs. Even working at a fast food place isn’t simple.
That alienates a good chunk of the population from being able to perform useful work.
That book is shit and should not be cited in any serious discussion. Here’s a good video explaining why the book is full of racist shit: https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/UBc7qBS1Ujo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Precisely, the hill to die on is to socialize the profits, not to demand we keep the shitty, injuring, repetitive task jobs that break a person’s back by 35.
You don’t protest street lights to keep the lamp lighters employed. The economy needs to change fundamentally to accommodate the fact that many citizens won’t have jobs yet need income. It won’t change, but it needs to.
So we’ll keep blaming the wrong thing, technology that eases the labor burden on humanity, instead of destroying the wealth class that demands they be the sole beneficiary of said technology and its implementation in perpetuity to the detriment of almost everyone outside the owner class. Because if we did that, we’d be filthy dirty marxist socialist commies that hate freedumb, amirite?!
Bullshit. Learn how to train new hires to do useful work instead of mundane bloat.
100% if an AI can do the job just as well (or better) then there’s no reason we should be making a person do it.
Part of the problem with AI is that it requires significant skill to understand where AI goes wrong.
As a basic example, get a language model like ChatGPT to edit writing. It can go very wrong, removing the wrong words, changing the tone, and making mistakes that an unlearned person does not understand. I’ve had foreign students use AI to write letters or responses and often the tone is all off. That’s one thing but the student doesn’t understand that they’ve written a weird letter. Same goes with grammar checking.
This sets up a dangerous scenario where, to diagnose the results, you need to already have a deep understanding. This is in contrast to non-AI language checkers that are simpler to understand.
Moreover as you can imagine the danger is that the people who are making decisions about hiring and restructuring may not understand this issue.
The good news is this means many of the jobs AI is “taking” will probably come back when people realize it isn’t actually as good as the hype implied
This.
In accounting, 10 years ago, a huge part of the job was categorising bank transactions according to their description.
Now AI can kinda do it, but even providers that would have many billions of transactions to use as training data have a very high error rate.
It’s very difficult for a junior to look at the output and identify which ones are likely to be incorrect.
And AI is not always the best solution. One of my tasks at my job is to respond to website reviews. There is a button I can push that will generate an AI review. I’ve tested it. It works… but it’s not personal. My responses directly address things they say, especially if they have issues. Their responses are things like, “thanks for your five-star review! We really appreciate it, blah blah blah.” Like a full paragraph of boilerplate bullshit that never feels like the review is addressed.
You would think responding to reviews properly would be a very basic function an AI could do as well as a human, but at present, no way.
They don’t want to train new hires to begin with. A lot of work that new hires relied on to get a foothold on a job is bloat and chores that nobody wants to do. Because they aren’t trusted to take on more responsibility than that yet.
Arguably whole industries exist around work that isn’t strictly necessary. Does anyone feel like telemarketing is work that is truly necessary for society? But it provides employment to a lot of people. There’s much that will need to change for us to dismiss these roles entirely, but people need to eat every day.
The “not willing to train” thing is one of the biggest problems IMO. But also not a new one. It’s rampant in my field of software dev.
Most people coming out of university aren’t very qualified. Most have no understanding of how to actually program real world software, because they’ve only ever done university classes where their environments are usually nice and easy (possibly already setup), projects are super tiny, they can actually read all the code in the project (you cannot do that in real projects – there’s far too much code), and usually problems are kept minimal with no red herrings, unclear legacy code, etc.
Needless to say, most new grads just aren’t that good at programming in a real project. Everyone in the field knows this. As a result, many companies don’t hire new grads. Their advertised “entry level” position is actually more of a mid level position because they don’t want to deal with this painful training period (which takes a lot of their senior devs time!). But it ends up making the field painful to enter. Reddit would constantly have threads from people lamenting that the field must be dying and every time it’s some new grad or junior. IMO it’s because they face this extra barrier. By comparison, senior devs will get daily emails from recruiters asking if they want a job.
It’s very unsustainable.
Indeed: at least in knowledge based industries, everybody starts by working with a level of responsability were the natural mistakes a learning person does have limited impact.
One of my interns read the wrong voltage and it took me ten minutes to find his mistake. Ten minutes with me and multiple other senior engineers standing around.
I congratulationed him and damn it I meant it. This was the best possible mistake for him to make. Everyone saw him do it, he gets to know he held everything up, and he has to just own it and move on.
Lol it’s not ChatGPT screwing over Gen Z. It’s the rich business owners who care more about profits than people.
It was already happenning in things like Software Developmnt with outsourcing: all the entry level stuff was sent away to be done by people who cost a fraction of what even a Junior Dev would cost in the West, and that’s exactly the stuff that one starts one’s career with.
As someone who lives in the east where these jobs are outsourced to, it’s not like junior devs here get to work on them either. Most outsourced stuff is assigned to people higher up. The talented juniors are left sitting on the bench as retainer manpower, others are in an endless string of unpaid internships.
The job situation is more similar then you think all over the world
Can you explain what you mean by retainer manpower? I’ve never worked anywhere where there was an extra person. Usually a job that requires 20 people would be set up for 20, 3 would leave the company, one would go out on disability and you have 16 doing the job of 20. They make a new middle management role with little to no raise but a sense of pride that you are now in charge and they stick that person with ensuring the 16 people don’t fall behind. Which really means you now have 15 workers, and 1 person stuck in meetings all day explaining why we are barely keeping our heads above water.
Companies hire junior devs (and other cheap labour) as “reserves”, in the off chance that you get more projects (sometimes this is negotiated as a bonded contract, which you can’t break for 3-5 years, but I hear that abusive practice is dying slowly).
They are paid abysmally low salaries, but youre not allowed to work, or find work elsewhere while you’re on this type of contract. If a project comes and you’re needed, you’re put on a regular contract that is comparatively not as low paying.
All the factors you mentioned are still at play, these people are almost never put on existing projects, so you end up with less people doing more work, with more people just sitting around doing nothing waiting for new projects.
This type of environment is extremely negative and depressing to be in, and it promotes a lot of office politics to get yourself off that list and into a better salary etc.
In an ideal world, people would start receiving better and more fulfilling opportunities when their mundane tasks are automated away. But that’s way too optimistic and the world is way to cynical. What actually happens is they get shitcanned while the capitalists hoard the profits.
We need a better system. One that, instead of relentlessly churning for the impossibility of infinite growth and funneling wealth upwards, prioritizes personal financial stability and enforces economic equallibrium.
